Also includes information on interviewing a web host. For information on Email conferencing, look under CONFERENCES:EMAIL

RESEARCH TOOLS (HOLTZMAN)
The following article was forwarded to me from Greg Fritz back in April. It is a treatise by Christian computer guru, Pete Holtzman <dag.XC.Org>, on how to make the most of the Internet!

There are some standard resources, like www.xc.org/world-christian.html ... But really, the Internet has gone way beyond lists of resources. I usually explain to leaders that it is an entirely new level of information resource: the greatest library the world has ever seen. It has about 8 times more documents than than the Library of Congress. And _every_ word, in _every_ document, is indexed in the card catalog! I can with increasing confidence tell people "ask me a question that you want to know something about, and we'll probably find an answer on the Web".

New research tools require new techniques of doing research, and this is no exception. For example, doing cross-cultural research on the web required me to understand that I need to search NOT for "key words" that I'd expect to find in a card catalog, but the _real_ words used in the documents I'm looking for! E.g., if looking for a document about an unreached people in China, I need to remember (a) to search for "minority people" not "unreached people", and (b) to search for "people's republic" rather than "china"... All in all, there's an incredible variety of information available. Ranges from missions-useful (info on people and places everywhere, including pictures, maps and sounds) to daily life useful (tax forms for every state, catalogs of all kinds, prescription drug info, home fix-it info, etc)... even radio broadcasts from around the world... to the useless or detrimental (pornography). It is _all_ there. Just type a word or three into an index, and you'll find lots of resources. And you can type words in any language, to find documents in that language!

SOME WEB SITES TO CHECK OUT.
SEARCH ENGINE (METACRAWLER)
http://www.metacrawler.com/index.html

GENERAL INFORMATION:

All you really need here is a starting point and then you can jump from place to place with hyper-links. A good starting point is...
http://www.xc.org

CONTINENTS/REGIONS RESEARCH

• http://www.webperfect.com/africa.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw398.html
• http://199.56.154.3/info_center/aor/africa.html
• http://www.ensmp.fr/~scherer/adminet/africa/
• www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Home_Page/Country.html
• http://www.webperfect.com/afrinet/news.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw478.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw419.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw818.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw836.html
• http://www.ee.ed.ac.uk:80/~jhu/china-home.html
• http://www.china-time.com/
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw352.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw455.html
• http://www.kenyaweb.com/
• http://violet.berkeley.edu/~korea/index.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw1398.html
• http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~jachesh/latin.html
• http://menic.utexas.edu/mes.html
• http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/cmenas/
• http://www.clark.net/pub/lschank/web/mideast.html
• http://www.nerdworld.com/nw779.html
• http://ppc2.gis.univie.ac.at/geography/wfb94/fb94toc.html

MISSION ORGANIZATIONS

• http://www.sim.org/index.html

LINKS TO INDIVIDUAL MISSION AGENCIES, INCL. E-MAIL ADDRESSES

• http://genesis.acu.edu/chowning/africa/miss/missdept.htm
• http://www.ad2000.org/homegraf.htm
• http://www.mdalink.com/CCC/
• http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/res10.html#cweb
• www.cadvision.com/Home_Pages/accounts/cnaz/ch_growth.html
• http://www.crmnet.org
• http://www.gem-werc.org/ http://www.iams.org.uk/
• http://www.iclnet.org/ http://www.iteams.org/ITeams/
• http://www.mdalink.com/JESUSproject/
• http://www.lausanne.org/
• http://www.wvi.org/marc/
• http://www.maf.org/
• http://www.gospelcom.net/navs/
• http://office3.divinity.cam.ac.uk/carts/namp/
• http://web.canlink.com/ocrt/ocrt_hp.htm
• http://www.promisekeepers.org/ http://www.sil.org/
• http://www.un.org/
• http://www.uscwm.org/training.html#anchor2016843
• http://www.wcc-coe.org/oikumene.html

MISSIONS INFORMATION:

• http://www.tecc.co.uk/jesusa/dawn/
• http://www.bakerbooks.com/ccc/cid/
• http://www.xc.org/Brigada/brigada.html
• http://www.christian-info.com/
• http://www.nn.independent.co.za/~donn/clt/sites.html
• http://www.equip.org/
• http://quark.cs.sun.ac.za/~gjvr/research-sites.html
• http://www.3rdWorld.org/trends.html
• http://cws.film.library.parti@ecunet.org/
• http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue.html
• http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/mission6.html
• http://quark.cs.sun.ac.za/~gjvr/
• http://www.ICCM.org/
• http://members.aol.com/missionres/mrn.htm
• http://www.xc.org/helpintl/mrd.htm
• http://www.sat7.org/
• http://www.sim.org/index.html
• http://www.leaderu.com/menus/homepage.html
• http://www.library.yale.edu/Internet/xtian.htm#eighth

PUBLISHERS

• http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/index2.html
• http://www.bakerbooks.com/
• http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/
• http://www.bookmasters.com/
• http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/book/titlesearch
• http://www.bookmasters.com/interclt.htm
• http://www.gospelcom.net/ivpress/
• http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost/ http://www.oup.co.uk/
• http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/
• http://www.zondervan.com/academic.htm

SCHOLARSHIP

• http://www.bible.org/bibsac/bibsac.htm
• http://www.bible.org/
• http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/book/titlesearch
• http://ccel.wheaton.edu/
• http://www.crosssearch.com/
• http://fp.sedona.net/budman/
• http://muse.jhu.edu/
• http://web.canlink.com/ocrt/ocrt_hp.htm
• http://re-xs.ucsm.ac.uk/re-xs.htm
• http://www.tren.com/
• http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sed/rsnet.htm
• http://wesley.nnc.edu/
• http://www.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Religion
• http://www.wheaton.edu/Missions/MissionsHome.html
• www.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/Japan/Society_and_Culture/
• http://thelist.iworld.com/
• http://www.root.or.jp/eduventure/
• http://www.jwindow.net/
• www.xc.org/world-christian.html

For general information on Mission, as well as People groups please see:
http://www.iinet.net.au/~createit/Researchlinks.html

...A new FREE E-MAIL service is called Mercury Mail. This appears to be of great interest to overseas missionaries in particular. You get a daily free customized e-mail of all the top news stories. Overseas people especially who are starved for news from home might be greatly helped by this service. Many missionaries have told me that they can get e-mail but they can't web browse because of limited access. This seems to be a solution! To subscribe you have to go to their web page at: http://www.merc.com/cgi/geocities.cgi and subscribe. Then you start getting free news. That's it.

[Pete thanks the following other Christian computer gurus for their assistance with this article: Grahame Dryden, Phil Elkins, Jay Gary, Dr. Steve Hoke, Paul Lay, Dr. Scott Moreau,and Dr. Thomas N. Wisley

BOOK: Christian Cyberspace Companion $12.79
Available from WorldChristian News, P.O. Box 26479, Colorado Springs, CO 80936 USA. Tel: 1 (719) 442-6409; Fax 1 (719) 380-0936; Email: wcn@xc.org All prices payable in U.S. Dollar cheques, visa or MasterCard. For shipping in the U.S., add $3 first item; .50 each additional, contact WCN for International shipping prices.

BOOK: Guide For Internet Evangelists
How to use the Internet effectively for evangelism? The British organisation SOON developed a practical guide for Internet evangelists: 'Web evangelism. Exciting new tool for the Millennium.' Patrick Johnstone, author of Operation World, writes about this guide: "It is a significant contribution to a whole new way of looking at evangelizing in the coming century - through the Internet. Here are many lessons which have been learned that I trust will prove beneficial to other Christians embarking on such an outreach ministry to the global Netizen community!" More information: http://www.brigada.org/today/articles/web-evangelism.html http://www.soon.org.uk Source: Joel News

BOOK: Soul in Cyberspace $7.99
Available from WorldChristian News, P.O. Box 26479, Colorado Springs, CO 80936 USA. Tel: 1 (719) 442-6409; Fax 1 (719) 380-0936; Email: wcn@xc.org All prices payable in U.S. Dollar cheques, visa or MasterCard. For shipping in the U.S., add $3 first item; .50 each additional, contact WCN for International shipping prices.

ADDRESSES OF MISSION AGENCIES
Ever want to find the email address or web page of a mission agency? Here's some web pages that contain lists of agencies and links to their sites.

• www.goshen.net/calebproject/urlchr.htm (by John Hanna)
• www.xc.org/brigada/others.html (by Doug Lucas)
• www.cmd.org.nz/agencies.html (New Zealand)
• www.netaccess.on.ca/~sma/gallery/gallery.htm (Canada)
• www.sim.org/others.html (Large list by SIM)
• www.ad2000.org/adoption/AGPadopt.htm (adopt-a-people)

THE WEB HOST INTERVIEW
In tandem with the exploding number of World Wide Web sites, the number of hosts is multiplying at an equally astonishing rate. Dallas consultant James Gaskin suggests some questions you should ask your prospective Web host before you sign on the dotted line: How much bandwidth is available, and by what means are Web servers connected upstream to the Internet? (The closer your provider is to the Internet backbone, the better response your clients will receive.) What kind of fault tolerance is installed? (How long will your host server be down in case of technical problems?) What kind of reporting does the company provide, and in how much detail? (Some companies provide numbers of hits at only three levels -- fewer than 1,000, up to 5,000, and above 5,000 hits a month.) How does it handle naming Web sites? (Look for one that will let you call your site "www. yourcompanyname.com.")

And remember, "You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth." (Information Week 22 Jan 96 p60) --Submitted by Dave Moody <DMoody@CProject.com>

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